On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had thwarted more disinformation campaigns. This time, though, not all of the blame fell upon Russia. That’s important because although Russian interference has dominated the news cycle, other countries can and would like to try to undermine the United States and are looking to do so through social media.
Social media emerged in the wake of the 2016 election as a prime location to target U.S. politics through divisive disinformation campaigns. The goal of such efforts is to polarize U.S. public opinion creating chaos, a divisive political climate and, ultimately, undermining democracy.
For this to work humans have to look at the material and then be swayed by it. As it turns out though, humans are more easily swayed than we believe and likely to be receptive to things that show up as we passively scroll through social media feeds. This is great if you are using Facebook ads to sell products, but when it comes to selling political disagreement, division and anger, social media divides rather than connects.
Companies such as Facebook and Twitter recognize this and have, to their credit, attempted to do a better job of investigating and removing inauthentic content – especially from foreign actors.
Those efforts have paid off and, in a statement released Tuesday, Facebook said that it had “removed 652 pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US.”
Some of these accounts, operating as part of a networks with “Liberty Front Press” went online as early as 2013 according to Facebook’s statement. The network, including the page “Quest 4 Truth” was traced back to Iranian state media.
In addition to targeting Iranian linked accounts and pages, Facebook also said that it was working with U.S. law enforcement to remove Russian linked disinformation campaigns.
Separately, Twitter announced that the company had also “suspended 284 accounts from Twitter for engaging in coordinated manipulation.” Twitter also pegged those accounts to Iran, indicating that the misinformation campaign was carried out through several platforms.
These announcements come only a day after Microsoft announced that it had blocked Russian-linked cyberattacks using look-alike domain names that targeted U.S. political groups and even the U.S. Senate.
Microsoft linked the registered domain names likely to be used in “phishing schemes” to the Russian government-linked group known as “Fancy Bear” or APT28.
Although attention in the U.S. has focused on attacks and disinformation coming from Russia, and clearly Russia does pose a threat, the public and lawmakers need to be vigilant of other actors as well. Today, Iran was the culprit but it could easily be China or North Korea tomorrow.
Indeed, one of the most devastating attacks, the WannaCry ransomware attack, was linked to North Korea, and there is evidence of Chinese attempts to gain access to the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki. These too are threats that cannot be ignored.
